Alarming Rise in Botnets Scares The Father Of Internet

Warning the dynamic attendees at the "World Economic Forum" at Davos, Vint Cerf - Founder of the World Wide Web - confessed botnets to be a serious threat to Internet. List of attendees included government as well as business leaders. The hazards & power of the Internet was the issue discussed in this forum.

Scores of compromised PCs constitute these Botnets. A PC is compromised when a Trojan gains entry in it giving its control in the hands of the hacker. Vint Cerf asserted that cyber criminals might be using up to one-fourth of online computers in these botnets, BBC News site reported.

Miscreants use these Botnets to send spyware and spam emails, and launch the denial-of-service attacks. Cert divulged that the use of Botnets to carry out malicious activities over the Internet has increased at an alarming pace in recent times. Comparing their spread with a pandemic, Cert warned them to be capable of undermining Internet's future.

By covertly seizing the control of a PC along with its Internet connection, trojans empower the remote criminals to carry out their mischievous activities.

The panel of experts including Hamadoun Toure, International Telecom Union's Secretary General, and Michael Dell, Dell computers' founder, gave their consent on the need to find out a solution so that web can survive in the future.

However the other members of the panel weren't quite sure about the feasible solution, albeit they identified authentication and OS to be the key issues.

Several members confessed that hiding their track was still very easy for cyber criminals, although they agreed that definitively identifying every individual is something that's probably not sought-after.

MessageLabs' Chief Security Analyst Mark Sunner divulged Cert's warning to be far from scare mongering. According to Mark, the picture isn't as dismal is Cert has painted it.